


The Silver Line

by belovedmuerto



Series: Keep You Like An Oath [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Gen, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Canon, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Steve Needs a Hug, but it'll get better, except not, soulmates!au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-24
Updated: 2015-05-24
Packaged: 2018-04-01 01:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4001122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belovedmuerto/pseuds/belovedmuerto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve asks his mother exactly once, how you know you've met your soulmate. How do you tell?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Silver Line

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to Moonblossom for the beta and wrangling of my continued stupidity when it comes to tenses. <3 
> 
> This is part one of four in this series. It's really all one big story, kind of, but it didn't feel right as chapters. I dunno, you guys. I just needed to write a soulmates AU. 
> 
> Part two is already finished! So hopefully that'll be up soon, although I want to get started on part three before I post it. Or something. I dunno, I've been up since three thirty this morning and I got, like, four hours of sleep. I could be typing gibberish for all I know.

The Asset watches the Target fall towards the water. The Asset watches him fall, and it hurts. It feels like pain, in the middle of the chest, near where the Asset’s heart beats, where the engine that keeps the Asset functional lives. Each beat roars in the Asset’s head, and each one sounds like _wrong_. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. 

The Asset watches the Captain fall towards the river, towards almost certain drowning, not even a super-soldier can breathe underwater, and his chest aches with the wrongness of it, because the captain is not a target. He’s not supposed to be a target. The Captain is _his_.

The Asset forces the arm to let go of the burning, sinking ship, and follows the Captain into the water.

\---- 

Steve asks his mother exactly once, how you know you've met your soulmate. How do you tell? And she smiles at him, sadly. He remembers the way she used to smile, vaguely, an impression of joy, of laughter, of the way she was before his dad died. Before she faded into grey and quiet and sorrow, and never really came back.

She smiles at him sadly, though, when he asks, and puts her arm around his shoulders. "I can't really tell you, sweetie. You just know."

He doesn't ask again. He tries so hard not to do things that will make his mother sad. She has enough sadness without him adding to it (which he does, regularly. He just can’t quite manage to keep his mouth shut, sometimes).

He learns that he doesn't want to end up like his mother, faded and grey, sorrow etched into her every line, as the years pass and she doesn’t ever go back to the way she used to be, not even close. Eventually he figures out that for her, the sorrow will always be the biggest thing in her life, even bigger than her love for him, because she and his father were soulmates, and people just don’t really recover from losing their soulmate.

In the end, Steve isn’t sure he’ll be given much choice in the matter. 

Because she was right. He just knows. He's known for years. 

\----

If someone asked Steve to recall how he and Bucky first met (and no one does, really; too afraid of how he'd react, he supposes. No one asks except Sam), he would probably shrug and deflect and maybe even go so far as to say he doesn't remember. Some people would be able to tell he’s lying when he says that, but they aren’t the people who would ask, so it doesn’t matter if he’s lying or not.

It doesn't really matter how they met. Steve was young, they both were, so his recollection of events is blurred and probably conflated with other similar instances, and with the way his mom and Bucky's would tell the story sometimes, on those rare instances both women were in the same place and inevitably got to talking about the things Bucky and Steve got into.

They both thought it was Bucky who was the bad influence, and Buck would always puff up with pride when they admonished him for it. He could take it, he was always happy to bear the brunt of it. But it was Steve who was always angry and starting fights Bucky would have to finish. Neither of them ever bothered explaining that to their moms.

Steve had been telling off a couple of kids for doing... something. He couldn't tell you what, and it didn't matter; he was always telling someone off for something. The kids had taken offense at his words and pushed him down in the gutter. They were older than him, and bigger, and meaner, too.

Steve got back up, mad as a hornet, knees and palms scraped from the pavement, so they laughed at him and pushed him down again, giving him a couple of kicks to really drive the point home.

Steve was curled up as small as he could go, trying to catch his breath to get up again, because you never surrender, not when you're right, when someone started yelling, and the two kids decided retreat was a good idea.

A moment later, there was a hand on his shoulder, and, "Hey kid, you all right?"

Steve had sat up, slowly, and pushed his hair out of his face. He’d sniffled but he was not crying, he never cried in front of people, and he’d looked up into a pair of wide, concerned blue eyes.

He’d had to blink at the other boy for a minute, because he felt strange, in his chest. Like when an asthma attack is coming on, but not. He’d taken a deep breath, and everything settled down again and he was ok, and this kid was grinning at him, a big shit-eating grin that should’ve make him mad but instead just made him smile back, a little.

"I had 'em on the ropes," he muttered (except it came out 'wopes' because sometimes ‘r’ sounds still gave him trouble, that's how young they both were).

"I know you did," the other kid said, still smiling. "C'mon, let's get you home before you find someone else to beat you up."

The other kid draped an arm around his shoulder, mostly as a show of solidarity but a little bit to make sure Steve won't fall over, and together they limped towards Steve's house. School was out for the day, so the neighborhood was loud with the sounds of kids who haven't yet been press-ganged into work, by their parents or their circumstances.

"I'm Steve," Steve eventually said, when they were taking a break between floors so he could catch his breath. His palms hurt and his knees hurt and there was a little bit of blood oozing down his leg. His ribs had hurt where the other kids had kicked him. But the knees could (and would) be explained away easily, and as long as none of his ribs were broken he could probably fudge telling his mom about it, and not get that look she gave him when he’d gotten himself beaten up again.

"I'm James," the other kid replied. "But you can call me Bucky. My friends call me Bucky." And he’d grinned at Steve again.

Steve had smiled back.

\----

When Sam asks him about how he and Bucky met, and he does, after the bridge but before the helicarriers, it’s because he’s genuinely interested. But he also asks because he’d said that they might have to kill Bucky, and Steve had choked on his breath at the thought of it, and Sam had looked at him for a minute and, wiping the look of revelation off his face, simply said, “Oh. Well, ok, we’ll work around that. Does Natasha know?”

“I don’t know,” Steve whispers. “Maybe. I think she’s pretty much omniscient.”

Sam chuckles a little, though there’s no real humor here, only more problems, more obstacles, all of them called the Winter Soldier, all of them called James Buchanan Barnes. “You ever told anyone, man?”

Steve shakes his head vehemently. “We didn’t talk about it.”

When Sam asks him, it’s to get him breathing again, get him talking again. 

Steve shrugs off the question, at first, but Sam presses him, trying to draw him out of his own head for a few minutes, out of the impending panic attack. And Steve tells him about it, he talks. He tells the story, but there are a few things that stand out to him, in his memory. Those are the things that he knows he really remembers, the things he’s not telling because that’s the way the story was told to him. 

He remembers Bucky’s smile, wide and mischievous and so, so happy, like he’d felt it too, from the very start.

He remembers the way his chest had felt funny, like he was about to have an asthma attack, and how it had gone away and he’d taken what felt like the deepest, freest breath he’d ever drawn. And he remembers that the rest of the day, he’d felt amazing, like everything was going to be ok, even though he never felt that way, even though his knees and his palms were all scraped up, even though his ribs were bruised and it actually hurt a little bit to breathe.

Sam nods at him when he stops speaking. “You were pretty young when you two met, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, we were kids.”

“Did you know, then?”

“Nah, I didn’t figure it out for a few more years after that. I just knew he… felt right. He always felt right.” Steve shrugs, blushing. It’s hard to talk about, even after all this time. After all the time he’s spent trying not to end up like his mom, trying to be part of the world, and not the gray and faded thing she’d been most of his life.

“There’s a lot of stories, these days, about what it’s like to meet your soulmate,” Sam says, conversational. He’s not looking at Steve now, letting him collect himself. “Yours fits pretty closely.”

They stand in silence for a while, while Steve puts himself back together again, and tries to prepare for the possibility of having to do something really irreparable to his soulmate. Sam stands steadfast at his side, giving him the few minutes he needs, and then Steve heads off to steal his old uniform from the Smithsonian.

\----

Steve is sick. This is nothing new, nor is the delirium. He's used to it, though it scares him, used to the way the drawings tacked up on the wall next to his bed have morphed into something different every time he looks at them. He's used to hearing the soft cadence of his mother's prayers in his fever dreams.

Bucky is here now. Steve tries to tell him to go, doesn't want him to get sick too, but either Bucky doesn't hear him or the way he’s clinging to him tells the lie for what it is. He's selfish, and he wants Bucky nearby, because Bucky is his friend, his best friend, and Bucky feels right. Just being near Bucky makes him feel better, even though he feels terrible.

Bucky takes care of him, even when he doesn’t want to be taken care of, even when he’s insisting that he’s fine, he can do this himself, he’ll be fine. But Bucky doesn’t listen to him, just props him up in his bed and sits with him, takes a turn so his mom can get some rest, reminds him to breathe, as if he doesn’t _know_ he needs to try and draw breath deep into his lungs, where it just doesn’t want to go.

Bucky tries to force some broth down his throat, and he sips futilely at it, it soothes the soreness even as it makes him cough, but Bucky is determined, and Steve is only partially present, only just able to listen to what Bucky’s muttering to him.

It’s late, and there’s not much light, just what seeps through from the kitchen, but Steve can see the thin, shining silver thing that connects them, and it makes him smile.

He never really remembers it when the delirium breaks, but he can see it clearly now, and he can remember the other times he’s seen it, this thing that connects them, wraps around them the way Bucky has his arms around him right now. It’s comforting, knowing it’s there.

It’s why he can’t quite give up, even when he’s pretty sure it would be easier on everyone if he were to just drift away forever. He’s afraid of it, and he knows it’s selfish to stay, to keep Bucky attached to him this way, when Bucky should find someone else, someone who deserves him, and will make him happy, but he can’t let go.

After the fever has finally broken, and he can sit up in bed on his own, slowly spooning more soup into his mouth, with Bucky sitting at the end of the bed, alternating between dozing because he’d been up half the night and grinning at him, happy he’s finally on the mend, he doesn’t see it anymore. Steve doesn’t even really remember seeing it to begin with, just like usual, and what little sense of it he has is muddled by the delirium. But he feels it, he knows it’s there, a certainty that Bucky is _his_ in some way, some truly important, vital way.

Steve tries not to think about it too much, because it’s scary, being attached like this to another person. Especially another person who’s a boy. It’s not overly common, having a soulmate, and it’s almost unheard of, having one of the same gender. Even so, queer is illegal, and it frightens him, that people might find out. There are stories, urban legends about people who have soulmates of the same gender disappearing, never being heard from again. Even in Brooklyn, where people turn a blind eye much of the time, where things are more progressive. There are still stories, and it’s scary.

So he tries not to think about it, but it’s always there, in the back of his head.

\----

When they’re about nine, Steve had finally given in and asked, one night when they’re having a sleepover because Steve’s mom has to work a double and doesn’t want him staying home alone. He never thinks of it as giving in, but even at that age, part of him knew that he shouldn’t ask, shouldn’t confirm it. It’s a dangerous secret to have, to share between them.

They’re camped out in the living room at Bucky’s, in a nest of couch cushions and blankets. Bucky is by his side, warm and safe, and their fingers are twined together under the blankets, loose and comfortable, where no one will see.

“Buck, we’re soulmates, right?” Steve whispers. He’s not sure if Bucky’s even awake to answer.

“Course we are,” Bucky mumbles back. He squeezes Steve’s fingers a little.

“‘Kay,” Steve says back. He shuts his eyes, and falls asleep soon after that, warm and comfortable with Bucky at his side, safe for the moment, and not yet afraid of what that might mean.

\----

They don’t talk about it, because they both know better, even as kids. They don’t even talk about it to each other, after that one night. They don’t talk about it, except when Steve is sick and delirious and certain that this might be the last time he gets sick, and wants Bucky to promise he won’t fade away without Steve, that he’ll find someone he can be happy with, will settle down and get married and have kids and a life without Steve holding him down, holding him back.

Steve still sees that tether between them when he’s delirious with sickness, and he finds it comforting even as he finds it terrifying. 

Bucky never swears the way Steve demands he does, breathless and sick and his eyes bright with fever, with the conviction that Bucky _has_ to keep going.

Bucky never swears, he refuses every single time, and sometimes he’s certain that that’s the reason why Steve never lets go. Because Bucky won’t swear, and Steve won’t leave unless he does.

\----

It takes Bucky three months after Steve’s mom dies to convince him that they should get a place together. It’s sheer stubbornness on Steve’s part, which they both know all too well, but he holds out anyway, because he needs to prove, at least to himself, that he can make it on his own, even if Bucky doesn’t quite believe it.

Bucky does believe it, though. He knows Steve can take care of himself, but he doesn’t have to. They’ve got each other, don’t they? It’s what finally convinces Steve. Or possibly Bucky’s constant nagging just wears him down. Bucky’s not afraid to be a little vulnerable, not for Steve. Not for both of them.

So they get a place together, tiny and drafty and really pretty awful but it’s theirs, their own, and Bucky works two jobs when he can, and Steve keeps taking art classes until he can’t anymore, and he does odd jobs and brings in what money he can when he can, and for a while things are okay. They’re together and happy, at least.

Bucky dates, because he’s a charmer and he loves to dance and even if they’re dirt poor he still needs to have some fun, sometimes. To make life not so bleak. He fixes Steve up when he can, and Steve usually goes along with it, although he gets this look on his face sometimes, like this isn’t what he wants.

Steve gets jealous, sometimes. He can’t help it, no matter what he does to reassure himself that Bucky is _his_. No matter what Bucky does to reassure him. He gets jealous when Bucky comes home late, smelling faintly of liquor and perfume, and it gives him a headache, perfume always does. Neither him nor Bucky wears any sort of cologne most of the time, because of the way Steve reacts to it. If it’s not a headache, it’s an asthma attack, and Bucky has said more than once he’d rather stink than cause one of those, they’re enough of a pain in the ass to deal with as it is.

Steve’s back is turned to him in his bed, arms curled in front of him, and something about it is pointed, about the way he’s curled up. He hadn’t waited up, he never waits up when Bucky’s out on a date, he never wants to know how it went, if Bucky’d had a good time.

And he had had a good time. Ruth was fun. She was a good dancer, and a great kisser, and she didn’t expect him to fawn over her and she certainly didn’t want him to marry her, so it was ok. She was fun. And Bucky could come home, to Steve, and feel like everything was right again.

And Steve’s mad at him. Angry that he was out late, angry that he’s been a little too loud in his arrival home, angry, perhaps, that it wasn’t Steve Bucky was out dancing with (Steve actually can dance, if he’s got a good lead. He’s a little awkward with it, and he can’t really do the more energetic stuff, but he can waltz, when Bucky can con him into it).

Bucky sighs and hangs his hat and coat up. He goes to the basin and scrubs at his face, his neck, to make sure there’s no trace of her perfume left to kick up Steve’s allergies, and he strips to his undershirt, his skivvies, and he pads across their tiny, drafty apartment to Steve’s bed and crawls in behind him, pulling the blankets (most of their blankets are piled on Steve’s bed; the only concession Steve had allowed. Come winter, they’ll all be on Steve’s bed again, and Bucky will be at his side, because Steve is never warm enough, even when he isn’t sick) over both of them and carefully sliding closer to Steve.

Steve hunches over and makes a huffing noise; definitely not asleep. 

They’re not. They’re not together, but. Steve is his, and he is Steve’s. Soulmates. There’s a finality to it, that Bucky likes, even though he hates it, too. It’ll never be easy for them. There will always be that fear there, that someone will find out, that they’ll disappear. 

So they’re not together, because, unspoken, they both know that’s tempting fate.

So they’re not together, but. In the creaky, not quite quiet darkness of their tiny, drafty shithole of an apartment, Bucky can slide his arms around his Steve, and gently coax him back, back, til they’re curled up together, and Bucky can hum a little against the nape of Steve’s neck, can press his nose into the soft hair there, can maybe press his lips against the skin, just once, and hold Steve tight, and let Steve know with his breath and his arms that he will always be Steve’s, and Steve will always be his.

\----

Steve always tries to reason himself out of his jealousy, when Bucky steps out with the pretty dames he always seems to attract. He’s not interested in stepping out with Bucky. He’s not. (He tells himself this until he very nearly believes it.) It’s not as though they could, even if-- Even if. And soulmates or not, Bucky isn’t interested in stepping out with Steve.

It doesn’t help. None of it helps the anger he feels, when Bucky comes home, loose with drink, flushed with dancing and laughter and the headiness of someone looking at you like _that_.

No one really looks at Steve like that. 

Well no one he’ll let himself notice back.

Not usually he doesn’t, anyway.

And that’s the worst of it. Safe or not, fear of disappearing, of being found facedown in the river for being queer, if they were like that they could hide it. People do it all the time. (Steve’s sure of it, sometimes. He hears the stories, the whispers about some of their neighbors.)

But they’re not like that, no matter how much they live in each other’s pockets, no matter that they’re soulmates.

Steve wants, and he’s brave and foolhardy in so much, but not this. He’s not brave when it comes to Bucky. He’s not brave in the face of _soulmate_. He’s not brave, and he doesn’t want to end up like his ma, gray and faded. He’s terrified of it. And even more than he doesn’t want to end up that way himself, he can’t stand the thought of that happening to Bucky. He can’t imagine Bucky gray and faded and unhappy, without those infectious smiles of his, without that laughter that always warms Steve from the center out.

Steve wants Bucky to move on, when he’s gone. Because of the two of them, Steve’s certain he won’t be the one to survive to old age. He’s pretty sure he’s only survived as long as he has because of his own refusal to give in and Bucky.

Sometimes he lashes out. At Bucky. It makes him feel sick, to do it. Awful, like he’s trying to drive him away. And maybe he is. Maybe it’ll be easier if Bucky just goes, now, before he’s found some dame to settle down and have kids with. Before Steve has to watch him get further and further away, before he has to deal with the way it’ll hurt where Bucky can see him.

“Do you let them think you could be theirs?” he spits, when Bucky comes home loose and happy from a date, smelling of booze and kisses and perfume that makes Steve’s nose itch.

Bucky stops short in the act of taking off his coat, shoulders going tense and lips turning down into a frown.

Steve hates it, hates seeing Bucky unhappy, hates that he did that, with his loneliness and jealousy. He turns away, stomps across the room and throws back the covers on his bed, slumps his way into it and turns his back on Bucky, still frozen and frowning by the door. He hates this, he hates himself right now. Bucky’d be better off without him, truly. Steve draws as deep a breath as he’s capable of right now--not very, with that scent still in his nose--and shuts his eyes. 

After a few moments of quiet, he hears Bucky move, muffled where his good ear is pressed against the pillow. Bucky is muttering to himself, but Steve can’t make out the words. He keeps his eyes stubbornly shut, willing himself to sleep, to shut the world out with unconsciousness. It isn’t supposed to be like this. They’re supposed to be friends, they’re soulmates. It’s supposed to make things easy, but all it’s ever done is make things hard. Hard to remember they’re just friends, hard to remember it can’t be _more_ , because it already is.

Steve startles a few minutes later when the bed dips behind him. It’s getting to be spring, so they don’t need to be sharing for warmth (or sharing to share, they don’t really kid themselves about it much anymore, although they also don’t talk about it).

Bucky crowds in close behind him, and he still smells like booze, like he’d had a few glasses of whisky while he’d been out, but he doesn’t smell like a dame’s perfume anymore, so he must’ve spent the past few minutes while Steve was fuming himself to sleep scrubbing it off his skin, where she’d no doubt pressed against him, laughing and flirting. Steve can see it, and he squirms, trying to push Bucky away.

“Go ‘way,” he mutters, shoving his elbows into Bucky’s ribs.

Bucky grunts, but doesn’t let up where he’s got his arms around Steve, and his nose pressed against the back of Steve’s neck, and he’s mumbling something against the skin there. Steve abruptly stops squirming, huffing a sigh. He turns his head, lets himself settle into Bucky’s arms, and hears what he’s mumbling. 

“Not theirs, Stevie,” he’s saying. “Yours. Yours.” 

Over and over again. Steve eventually falls asleep to his litany.

\----

Steve walks home slowly. Home isn’t going to feel like one for much longer. Bucky ships out first thing tomorrow. He’s out dancing with both of their dates right now, and Steve is walking home with a 1A in his pocket. 

It doesn’t really matter that it won’t feel like home without Bucky there, because he only has a few days before he has to report to Camp Lehigh for Basic. 

He wants to tell Bucky. He doesn’t want to tell Bucky.

He doesn’t want Bucky to worry about him. He can take care of himself.

Bucky will worry anyhow. He doesn’t need to make it worse.

His thoughts run in circles in his head as he shuffles towards home.

Anyway, Bucky’s out dancing, maybe more, with those girls, enjoying his last night of freedom. He probably won’t even be back before dawn, only long enough to grab his pack and tell Steve not to worry about him.

As if that will keep Steve from worrying. His chest aches at the mere thought of Bucky being so far away, across an ocean. With people trying to kill him every moment of every day.

Bucky is slumped on their tiny second- or third-hand sofa when Steve walks in the door (Steve’s pretty sure someone died on it once, at some point, but they’ve mostly gotten the smell out). Certain he was going home to an empty apartment, Steve had stopped and had a couple of drinks on the way, so he’s pleasantly fuzzed around the edges, and he can see Bucky staring at him, eyes solemn and wide. For a long few minutes, Steve just stares back. He knows his color is up, booze always does that, makes him red in the face, in the neck.

Steve can’t think of a thing to say. Nothing comes out of his mouth when he opens it to speak, anyway, only a sharp breath.

Bucky blinks at him, and Steve thinks that maybe Bucky’s chest aches too, at the thought of leaving Steve behind. But they don’t talk about it, so he can’t ask. He desperately wants to know, but he won’t ask, because having an answer would make it far too real.

Steve shuts the door and shrugs out of his jacket, crosses the room as he pushes his hair out of his face, and pushes at Bucky’s shoulder until he takes the hint and slumps over on the couch. Steve doesn’t look him in the eye, and Bucky seems to be looking away as well, eyes bright and scared. Steve crawls right over him and burrows into Bucky. His best friend. His soulmate. Steve tucks his head under Bucky’s chin, face against his neck where he can smell Bucky’s cologne (and for once it doesn’t bother Steve, it smells like _home_ ) and Bucky’s uniform and Bucky, and he feels Bucky’s arms go around him. He lets himself melt against him, and lets himself be held, like where they were little and it didn’t matter.

“You’ll come home, right?” Steve mumbles, a few minutes or a few hours later. He lets the ‘to me’ go unsaid.

“Course I will, Stevie,” Bucky mumbles back, into his hair, against his scalp. 

It tickles, and Steve shivers a little, resettles himself. He resists the urge to press his lips into the skin of Bucky’s neck, settles for pressing his whole face there instead, and Bucky’s arms tighten around him.

“I’m with you ‘til the end of the line, pal,” Bucky continues. It’s the closest either of them ever gets to a declaration, and Bucky says it all the time, as if he thinks Steve doesn’t get what it means.

\----

The Asset watches him approach and feels something that may be wariness. There is an image in his head, the concern on his handler’s face and, “I knew him.”

It doesn’t matter. It cannot. This is the mission. The Asset completes the mission, and then reports, is debriefed and put away ‘til the next time.

“Don’t make me do this,” the mission pleads.

The Asset will not be swayed.

\----

Steve can see how, under different circumstances, if god forbid he’d never met Bucky, if he didn’t know how it feels to have a soulmate, he can see himself falling madly in love with Peggy Carter. He can see it.

He’s probably more than a little bit in love with her anyway, and he finally understands a little of why Bucky went with all those dames, back in Brooklyn. And yet, it pales, against the ache in his chest that pulls him towards Bucky, that screams WRONG with every breath he takes without Bucky nearby.

When she tells him that Bucky is probably dead, for a moment it feels like he’s having an asthma attack again, and he wants to lash out. He wants to hit something, but he doesn’t. He wants to blurt out that it’s impossible, that he knows Bucky’s alive because he can feel it in his chest, in the aching that has been wrapped around his heart since the day Buck left. The serum didn’t change that, it only made his chest bigger, made more room for the ache to take root and grow in.

She’d found him doodling in the rain, drawing the anatomical heart, all tied up in cord, tight but not quite constricting, next to the dancing monkey. Both are things that he draws a lot. He’s had the image of the heart in his head ever since Bucky slipped out from beneath him on their couch at dawn the morning he left, ruffled his hair and walked out without a backward glance. Both of them are how he feels: the dancing monkey on the USO tour, empty smiles and hearty words for the crowds, and the way his heart aches, the way he sometimes dreams that he is bound to Bucky physically, not just as a soulmate.

Maybe the cord is what binds them. Sometimes he thinks he remembers seeing it, but he’s never entirely sure. It always feels like something he just dreamed.

“You were meant for more than this you know,” she had said, just before Steve found out Bucky was out there somewhere, captured, and Steve loved her for that, for seeing _Steve_ , not just Captain America.

\----

“I’m not gonna fight you,” the target says to him. “You’re my soulmate.”

He drops his shield, neither of them watching it fall away. 

Something is breaking inside the Asset and he hates it. Hates the uncertainty of it, the terror. He hates the little voice in his head whispering, “Mine.”

“You’re my mission,” he growls back.

\----

Bucky falls from the train, and Steve feels like his chest is going to implode with the ache of it, each beat of his heart crying out, he’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone.

He tries to drink a bar, and it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t help, and it doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, when he has to put the Valkyrie into the water.

\----

Steve wakes up in the 21st century where everything is different and weird and wrong and with the ache still lodged deep in his chest. He wonders if this is how his mother had felt, for years upon years after his father died.

He’s gone. He’s gone. He’s gone.

\----

Steve wakes up in the hospital, and the ache in his chest has changed. It doesn’t pulse with the knowledge that Bucky’s dead anymore. Now it urges him to get out there, to find him. 

The bullet wounds in his abdomen, his doctors and Sam all have different ideas about that.

Bucky may not want to be found, though. He doesn’t know. He can’t know. He does know that Bucky won’t be the same guy he’d grown up with, but then, Steve’s pretty sure he’s not that kid anymore either. He’s also certain that Bucky had started to remember. At the end. Before Steve had fallen. Bucky had started to remember, and was terrified.

Steve knows the feeling.

Sam is at his side, when he wakes up in the hospital. Sam is a good guy, a good friend. Sam has his back, the way Bucky used to. It’s reassuring.

\----

He wakes up again, and it’s mostly dark, the room full of shifting shadows, the quiet sounds of the nurse’s station down the hall drifting in from the slightly open door. He doesn’t know what woke him, but he can feel the pull of whatever they’ve got pumping through his veins, urging him back into unconsciousness.

Steve shifts and looks around. The ugly art print on the wall opposite the end of the bed looks different in the dark, and he remembers the way his drawings used to change, when he was delirious.

Steve shifts, and the shadow in the corner, denser than all the rest, shifts with him. Steve smiles and settles back. That was what had woken him.

Bucky--the Winter Soldier--shifts again, takes a single step forward, and Steve can just about see him clearly. He’s wearing dark clothes, has a hoodie pulled up over his hair, which is still mostly in his face. He’s glaring, and somehow Steve feels immensely comforted by that. Bucky always used to glare like that, when Steve was sick and he was worried. Either that, or the drugs are kicking back in hard. He can feel himself falling backwards into sleep again, and it’s too hard to fight right now.

“Mine,” the shadow whispers, fading back into the other shadows.

Steve smiles, his eyes sliding closed, sleep claiming him. “Yeah Buck,” he mumbles, the words feeling slippery in his mouth. “Yours.”


End file.
